Thursday, 26 June 2014

We were very lucky to have the lovely Luisa Brimble visit recently (accompanied by the equally lovely Emma Bowen). I've been admiring Luisa's gorgeous photography for ages and was thrilled when she offered to visit on a workshop day and take some shots for us. Hooray!

When you've got your eyes to the ground pulling out fireweed and you're running through clouds of flour every day and are too busy worrying about fences to actually look at the paddocks, it's absolutely wonderful to see this place through Luisa's eye.

Yeah our office really sucks.

Is it windy where you are? All our infrastructure is portable (and we live on a hill) so big winds kind of freak us out. We've been battening down hatches, moving chicken caravans into sheltered spots, keeping the brooders covered. We lost the trampoline, I believe it is in the hedge on it's way into the coffee grove, but the windmill is standing, the chicken caravan doors haven't blown off and all the children are accounted for. So we're winning.

Monday, 23 June 2014

You know that moment when you think, oh well, it can't get worse than this?

We lost the remainder of the mature batch of meat birds last night, the ones due to go for processing tomorrow, the fifty we hoped might at least pay for the feed and incubation costs of the lost birds.

We think we're up against more than one wiley fox that's figured out the electric mesh fence, the tested and trusted fence which has kept all our birds safe for two and a half years so far. The shooter we hoped would come last night couldn't. We double-fenced, used the fox lights, and set the fox trap. I left very early to visit my Mum in hospital in Sydney, recovering from an operation (she's doing very well, thank you), and I checked in mid morning to find Adam pretty much sans sense of humour. There's just no words really. So that's not why I'm writing.

This happens to farmers all the time, all over the country. Whatever you're doing and on whatever scale, you find yourself down to small change and brass tacks. The difference is this.

I got to bring home the cavalry.

We tried to say no thank you, obviously stay with Mum who isn't being discharged for a number of days, but the combination of the two of them, my parents, when they've made their mind up, is formidable. And it's Dad. He's awesome in a crisis. And has a gun licence. And can find fox tracks in the grass like a magician and has all sorts of solutions we'd never think of.

He's home for the night and the shooter arrived as well (with extras) and the layers are locked down and everything's going to be OK. It really is.

Because the other major difference is that we're not doing this on our own. Many, many farmers feel like Robinson Crusoe. Like lonely solo worker bees, incredibly vulnerable to guilt and despair and a sense of failure. What you've given us, every one of you reading this, every comment here and across social media, is a feeling of community. Like this really does ultimately effect all of us, every dairy farmer who stands over a cow down with milk fever, every market gardener looking at a crop of cabbages that were perfect yesterday and lie shredded after last night's hailstorm, everything that effects the person trying to grow the food we eat effects all of us.

And that is the sound of the food revolution in motion.

We don't want to eat industrially produced food that suppresses animals into systemic misery and ultimately poisons us all. We don't want vegetables that have to be washed in bleach to remove the poisonous chemicals they've been doused in to reduce bugs and maximise shelf-life.

The change is here. People are growing food differently, on small and large scales, and people are connecting with it.

So over here we are held up by the wave of compassion you sent at us. Friends and strangers have offered help and advice. We're a tiny little farm. But it turns out people seriously care whether small farms fail or succeed and this can only be marvellous.

And when it comes down to brass tacks, we've got the cavalry here.

We won't be eating chicken for a bit but we've got veggies. We'll never be hungry. I hope you won't be either.

Just when you think the sweetness has gone out of it and your heart is a drone, how about that, you find oranges at the back of the coffee grove.

Thursday, 19 June 2014

It's something Adman says, 'who'd be a farmer, eh?', when stuff goes wrong, or, you know, gets out or dies or doesn't grow or gets eaten or breaks or we hit the wall financially.

He always says it wryly, as if he's the farm kid and I'm the townie and this farming idea is a permanent forgone conclusion. Like he's in it past his boots, and we might have had a disasterous day but he'd still rather be here than anywhere.

He said it yesterday morning. After we'd gotten over the initial shock of losing another batch of meat chickens to a fox.

Not quite the whole batch this time. Two weeks ago it was the whole batch. The whole mature batch. That were due for processing the following week. That we'd paid for up-front (of course), paid for all the feed, all the infrastructure, and now receive zero income for. Which is not what it's about for us anyway, but it does drive us closer to that wall. We have to call Feather and Bone, the lovely sustainably-raised meat providore that we supply in Sydney, and explain that we'll be letting them down. We have to remember to call the abattoir and tell them we won't be coming. We have to compost all the carcasses, because a fox doesn't actually eat a hundred chickens, it just eats a few and kills the rest.

It's brutal. And I debated whether I should publish this photo. I didn't, initially, after we lost the first batch. People really would rather not hear the really dark side of farming. Mostly it'd be better to know everything's OK, not because people are not interested, but because they are! And because they want it to all be OK.

But then we lost over half the next batch. Same fox, I suspect. Of course we took measures after the first loss. We checked and double checked the fences. We invested in fox lights. We investigated alpacas and determined that when we can afford them, we'll buy a pair. We know people have had great success with Maremma dogs but we already have one dog and hoped she might help keep the fox away - she has up until now. But the fox somehow got over the electric netting fence.

We won't bait on this farm. Although that's what the Department of Primary Industries is strongly recommending we do. It only takes one person to have a living memory of losing a dog to 1080 poison to make it impossible to bring that poison onto our land. Dad, in this case. Aside from the fact Adam objects to baiting ethically.

So we went and picked up a humane trap this morning. We'll see what happens.

We choose to raise our birds in open range paddocks, because this environment is significantly healthier for the birds, but because they are not safely locked in an enormous stinky shed, inhaling toxic poop air and needing antibioitics in their feed to survive, they're potentially vulnerable to predators, however diligent we are.

Raising poultry on pasture is risky, and the farmer carries that risk. The providore who hitches themselves to that farmer does too: they have customers they'll disappoint as supply fluctuates. Customers share the risk by supporting the pastured poultry farmer and buying product at a premium price, priced that way to reflect the costs in doing things on a smaller scale, the hand raising, the bucket feeding, the water-checking, the fox-lights, scarecrows, fake owls, and late-night head-torch-wearing circuits of the meat chickens, checking the fences in the winds, checking when it gets too hot, checking when the temperature drops, and picking up a hundred small birds and putting them under the hoop house shelters on the first few nights they're in the paddock.

If you think pasture raised poultry is expensive, you're damn right it is.